Lots of clouds have rolled in. And lots of clouds have rolled right back out, especially when they realize that their BS doesn't work out so well when rewards are on the line.
So, those people we're going to attract, the average internet user, they are going to contribute BS?
The Steemit user base might be far from perfect, but when enough people smell a scam or authoritarian clowns disguising themselves as "peaceful" and "open-minded," they don't tend to last long around here.
No, what you're smelling is an over-enthusiastic tech lead who saw a huge win-win opportunity for Steemit and the Earth Nation. We really want to onboard the masses to the blockchain and all the opportunities available through it, because wider user adoption gives organizations like us a huge leg up when it comes to helping humanitarian . We want to do this because we actually care about doing good. Everyone here at our headquarters is living communally off of $200/mo: there's no possible argument you can make that we're doing this for the money.
Personally, as a writer and juggler who is a living breathing human being, I think the bot strategy Dakota employed was a little overzealous. I didn't really oppose him, because the man's a wiz when it comes to tech, numbers, and strategy. I say that as the team member that can explain to a kindergarten class that the universe can be described as a mechanical byproduct of a self-replicating, binary algorithm, which grows logarithmically more complex as new rule-sets are generated as emergent phenomena from previous rule-sets. I generally trust him, but I think he didn't factor in the emotional factor of social behavior.
That's really the bottom line here. From a completely rational place, our presence here at this time only serves to directly benefit everyone on Steemit. This response is unconscious herd mentality.
Unless you personally are worried about having a larger userbase will result in more competition in your particular niche, a very personal and self-centered fear, then you don't have a rational opinion against us. All things observed, all resources accounted for and tracked across time, from a game theory perspective of our predictable world, the long-term actions of the Earth Nation directly benefits every Steemit user.
The more value that is put into the system, the more value everyone on the system can generate.